1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to automated voice recognition and in particular, the use of automated voice recognition in order taking in the sales arena.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of human agents to make sales calls and process customer orders been prevalent for years. Incoming calls (calls from customers to merchants and service providers) have long been efficiently routed through virtual agents receiving keypad routing from inbound callers. In diverse business areas incoming calls often can be completed without the caller ever interacting with a live agent. Automated systems are often used exclusively for certain tasks, by responding to commands provided by callers through keypad entry or vocally. In fact, many automated telephone systems require an incoming caller to request an agent specifically if they have a need that is not fulfilled by the automated portion of the system, otherwise callers are never transferred to a live agent.
However, there has been some difficulty in automating sales calls, that is, calls made between customers and merchants. The emotional needs of customers calling to place orders for commercial products have typically not been met by automated systems. Merchants who accept telephone orders often wish to translate incoming calls into opportunities to sell more of their product, and the subtlety required to accomplish this goal without alienating customers has not, up to this point, been available from automated systems. Customers who are contacted by automated systems often hang up in frustration before an offer is even made.
Speech recognition systems have developed a great deal in recent years, but practical use for these systems has been limited. Innovation in this area has concentrated on the technical improvement of speech recognition capability (especially pauses, emotional state, word alternatives and accent parsing) rather than in the practical application of speech recognition technology for business uses. Although the technical capacity expanded, the speech-processing industry failed to match the technology to the needs of telemarketers.
Speech recognition systems were inadequate for automating sales-related customer calls either because the speech recognition technology was not capable of parsing complex vocal interactions, or because the underlying decision algorithms were not easily configurable and so did not adequately anticipate the needs of callers with respect to their situational, transactional and emotional needs. For example, in previously developed applications, when customers interrupted lengthy recordings, the message either continued, causing the customer to miss important information, or played again from the beginning, forcing customers to listen to lengthy messages repeatedly. Customers expect either in-person service, or automated service that approximates human behavior.
Because it was necessary for human agents to process sales orders, the cost of processing each order was fixed and could not be reduced by increasing the number of orders. Due to this high cost barrier to entry, many products with low profits in absolute dollar terms could not be processed in small quantities via telephone, because the cost of processing each order consumed or exceeded the profit from the sale.
Once a human agent has engaged in conversation a customer who is placing an order, commonly the customer expects the agent to complete the transaction by collecting payment, shipping and other information “in person” and is not satisfied if the agent transfers the call to an automated system, despite the fact automated systems are more efficient and less error-prone in processing order information. Because human agents must participate in a complete transaction once it has been initiated by a customer, the technology-driven efficiencies common to other telephone-based applications has been limited in the phone sales industry. Human sales agents can only process one order at a time, which severely limits the number of sales that can be made overall. Additionally, human agents must spend time waiting for customers to complete tasks such as making decisions and retrieving their payment information, further limiting the efficiency of the order processing system. Because automation capability has been limited in the area of order processing up to this point, the telephone sales order processing industry has been constrained both in terms of volume and efficiency.
Historically, human agents have been used to process sales calls because they could manage interactions too complex for previously developed automated systems. These interactions include tasks such as altering a sale offer, offering alternative products in response to a customer's situational needs, answering questions asked by a customer, pausing for interruption, and repeating themselves as appropriate.